This project
is a study of Jana Sterbak's work. I have only seen one of her works of
art in person: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic. The rest of my
observations are based (sub-optimally) on a review of books, photographs,
and flyers obtained through The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Prior to
this investigation I knew nothing of her other works. I'm happy to report
that my research into the body (as she takes us) of her work has been nothing
short of inspiring. Jana Sterbak is an incredible artist, and for me, she
is one of the very few conceptual artists whose art communicates boldly.
The first time I met Sterbak's meat dress,
Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic, it blessed me with the struggle
of sentience. At first I saw it from a distance and figured it for some
boring abstraction, somebody making household refuse into art. So I nearly
passed it by, but for the smell. So I went in for examination. Immediately
my stomach lurched and its implications came cascading through me: this
work was about glamour, beauty, fashion, food, vegetarianism, women, women
as dolled up consumption, hunger, and personal exposure, and more that would
come to me later.
So what was I smelling? Cured flanks of beef,
or Charqui which is Spanish from Quechua. Quechua is a Spanish dialect alive
somewhere in the Andes, where the Indians are known for their jerked guinea
pig… Sterbak is Czech but distant too, now a variation from the root like
this misplaced jerky, she lives in Vancouver and her art is primarily shown
in Canada and the United States… But back to the flesh. It is flanks of
beef stitched together with very strong thread, like dental floss -- it
had to be strong for when the meat was fresh it was several inches thick
and weighty hunks of it hung off at the seams or wherever the cut was imperfect.
Up close you can see the striations of muscle and fat that have hardened
into lusterless browns and white. It now clings to a dress-makers mannequin,
headless, armless, legless, alone, and center stage. The dress is beef jerky,
naturally shrunken by time to a tight fit over the womanly torso. The curing
process is part of the art. It makes me wonder whether this thing will eventually
disintegrate or just continue on a slow trajectory to becoming inert and
devoid of its important smell.
I think it is rare, at least for me, to have
so many ideas triggered all at once. I'm guessing it took about 30 seconds
for all these notions to unravel, take shape and process. The social commentary
is easy to get. One can hear it: "If women are just meat, might as
well wear clothes that show it." Sterbak turns the woman inside out,
"Here, just have it!"
A friend's response upon my asking was an
immediate, "Gross! But its good art." Gross and good
are primitive concepts which cannot be explained by other, more basic words.
They are labels for human primal responses. (For example gross follows
from that bleaaahh feeling in your gut.) Now I think her words were
no accident, they are a response to this type of art. It, too, is primal
-- any intellectualizing comes after the gut reaction. The work of art is
not difficult to interpret and therein lies the power. It communicates.
It may be a transgression of certain prescribed, moral sensibilities --
but this I am glad for.
And so what about beauty? Behind the flesh
dress at The Walker, a white wall displays a photo of the dress, fresh and
glistening with fat and blood fashionably modeled by a white-skinned woman.
It is hard not to consider yourself as the model at least for long enough
to get the feel. Imagine the cold wet meat on your skin. Feel the
weight of this fifty pounds of flesh and the cool bleeding that drips down.
Imagine the cow. Think about dinner, or a dinner party with your new outfit.
Think about how well protected you are covered with some other creature's
flesh exposed. You are living in something dead. It died for you to eat
it, wear it, sell it, view it as art.
Jana Sterbak wants to make you feel uncomfortable,
unsettled. An inscription to another of her works reads: "I want you
to feel the way I do: There's barbed wire wrapped all around my head and
my skin grates on my flesh from the inside." The work is a barbed wire
dress with electric current running through circular nickel-chrome bands
around the mid-section. The dress stands rigid and tall and violently electrified.
Projected on the wall behind it, the inscription carries on addressing you:
"…I will listen to the sound you hear, feed on your thought, wear your
clothes. Now I have your attitude and you're not comfortable anymore. …You're
beginning to irritate me: I am not going to live with my self inside your
body, and I would rather practice being new on someone else."
Is this about the relationship between the
human body and clothes? No, it is about the relationship between you
and your clothes and all the eyes on you. She plays on your anxieties
by fervently approaching you with images and objects and words that juxtapose
the things that keep you alive, safe, warm, and well fed with some of the
harsh realities to mortal existence. For sleeping pleasure she offers pillows
with diseases embroidered on them in a clean, white bed. What would your
lover say about you being on such a stage as this?
We are the viewers, an audience that appreciates
the art, or not. We may say that it is not good art, not in the sense of
something aesthetically appealing. Or we may say it is too blunt to do much
for consciousness raising. But very few of us could claim "I don't
get it" like many say about Picasso.
What we may have here is something that taps
into a dull, social rhythm, one that has meaning attached to the major overtones
of everyday life: food, clothing, self-image, socially defined roles. And
we get it, we can dance to it. It is like playing the Sex Pistols or early
Cramps records for three year olds: they get the rhythm and they dance to
it.
Jana Sterbak's work is profoundly personal.
That is why and how she grabs us. In Golum: Objects of Sensations, 1979-1982,
she has carefully crafted a set of internal organs -- lead hearts, a bronze
spleen painted red, a lead throat, a rubber stomach, a bronze tongue, a
lead penis etc.. In exhibition, our vital parts are splayed out, simple
and naked in some sort of embarrassed minimalism across the gallery floor.
Once again she has gotten right down inside us, this time touching and kneading
our very organs. In the work Catacombs, 1992, the deep personal implications
continue as we ponder the meaning of a partial human skeleton composed of
high-grade chocolate. We all like chocolate don't we? These edible human
remains are scattered on the floor of a room that either is very old or
has been carefully crafted and disintegrated to appear that way.
After review of the works discussed thus far
we should have no trouble placing Jana Sterbak's portrait of her lover within
the deeply personal, mortal-body context of her art. Where Van Gogh paints
himself, Picasso paints his mistress, and Man Ray prints the palm of his
hand, Sterbak produces the smelly essence of her partner. Perspiration:
Olfactory Portrait is a glass vial of synthetic perfume created through
scientific methods to approximate her lover's unique scent.
The themes of thought triggered by Jana Sterbak
are many and the intended ones are hard to distinguish from those that come
along for the ride. I doubt that Sterbak would value her messages above
the others that people experience. She knows she is unleashing the power
of imagination and allowing a free draw from the pool of both intended and
conjured images.
Jana Sterbak is a conceptual artist whose
work operates at two levels. First, there are the primal, gut level reactions.
These are the initial wake-up calls that the works activate, the unavoidable
facing of one's fear, humanness, mortality. With regard to these first reactions,
I had a lot of fun exposing people at my office to an 8 ˝ x 10" color
photo of Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic, in raw form being modeled
by a woman. At first they could not figure out what she was wearing, but
after a few seconds they would turn away shocked and rant a little about
their feelings of disgust and uneasiness. But they were interested -- and
it had meaning.
Second, her art offers intellectual inquiry
for those who are so inclined. To see this, one can look to the many articles
written by critics that range in their musings from fascination with the
dialectics and contradictions they interpret (such as freedom and constraint,
protection and exposure, beauty and aging) to a set of staunch feminist
statements. There seems to be no end to the depth of the philosophical inquiry
that the critics claim to be hers. At least the intellectuals are having
fun. Or we can look at the basis of her inspirations. Several of her works
are rooted in Greek mythology. The three Sisyphus works (1990, 1991,
1993) are spherical cages cut in half in which a man is confined. He can
propel himself by rocking and twisting. In a way the cage protects him,
but in another it leaves him unstable and forever in need of action. According
to the myth, Sisyphus was a clever and devious man who fooled the gods on
many occasions, but finally is condemned to spend eternity rolling a large
stone up the mountain. When he reaches the top it tumbles back down and
he starts over. Another work that was discussed earlier, Golem: Objects
as Sensations, is based on the Golem myth from Czech folklore. Golem
was a homunculus made from clay and magic to protect the Jews from religion-crazed
Christians. In addition, at least two more of her major works originate
from the story of Medea, the sorceress that was exiled and loses her place
to another woman. In an incredible act of vengeance she sends wedding presents
of a crown and a robe for the other woman who is instantly consumed by flames
upon putting them on. Sterbak's pieces are an electrified crown and a dress.